Richland College looks to boost digital forensics program with federal grant

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ROSE BACA/neighborsgo staff photographer

Richland College student Randy Harris extracts information from various devices in his digital forensics class. The northeast Dallas community college recently received a $510,894 grant from the National Science Foundation, part of a $63 million federal program to improve cybersecurity led by two-year schools.

In the realm of cybersecurity, specialists in digital forensics act as detectives. They try to figure out just how a security breach happened, retracing the digital fingerprints left behind.

It’s not an easy task. Just like at a real-life crime scene, analysts take special care to preserve the evidence.

“Mainly, what I tell students, digital forensics is risk management,” said Zoltan Szabo, head of the digital forensics and information assurance program at Richland College. “There’s a risk that we can actually change the data.”

Richland is looking to stake its claim in the burgeoning field of cybersecurity. The northeast Dallas community college recently received a $510,894 grant from the National Science Foundation, part of a $63 million federal program to improve cybersecurity led by two-year schools.

Richland hopes to use those funds to attract more students and bolster relationships with four-year programs, but also to work with K-12 schools to help keep kids safe on the Internet. It comes as the federal government and other area colleges are boosting cybersecurity efforts.

“There’s a lot of focus on this, and we’re in a perfect position to get a lot of people acquainted or introduced to this field that’s not going to go away,” Szabo said.

The digital forensics program launched at Richland in fall 2007.

The college has 104 students enrolled in digital forensics courses.

“This is a field that is very hot right now,” said Martha Hogan, executive dean of Richland’s School of Engineering, Business & Technology. “One of our missions as a community college is to build a workforce where there’s a need.”

Digital forensics requires information technology skills, but more so involves problem solving and testing hypotheses, Szabo said. Analysts must be able to recognize patterns and produce repeatable results.

They also must be able to document their findings in a way that’s admissible in court proceedings, which Szabo said can often trip up those with traditional IT training.

“We need to clearly explain what happened in certain situations, and how certain events occurred,” Szabo said. “All those regular detective questions we try to answer, but only looking at digital data.”

One of those graduates, 39-year-old Melissa Sokolowski, said she was hired at a private Dallas firm just three weeks after she finished the program. She had worked at home on an accounting firm’s help desk for 14 years, but said she wanted to branch off into a different IT field.

Sokolowski, who has two young children, enrolled at Richland in fall 2010. Now she investigates digital security breaches, including financial theft and fraud.

“I love doing research, and I’ve always had an investigative mind,” Sokolowski said. “I’ve always wanted to find out what’s the next step, what’s the next thing and get to the bottom of something.”

Most of Richland’s students are older adults such as Sokolowski, Szabo said. With the grant from the NSF, he hopes to attract more students out of high school. He’d also like to cater to former members of the military, who already have an established credibility.

But the bulk of that grant will go toward a digital infrastructure that will give K-12 teachers and administrators live, remote training on cybersecurity, Szabo said. As schools give laptops and tablets to students, he said it’s important to move beyond just talking about security and give hands-on experience.

“We need to understand what we do when we put technology in students’ hands,” Szabo said. “Whatever this technology brings, it also brings legal and moral responsibility.”

The grant could also help Richland bolster its reputation among four-year institutions, Szabo said. Currently, Richland digital forensics graduates can transfer credits to two four-year schools — Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology in Okmulgee, Okla., and Champlain College in Vermont.

Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Dallas have recently seen their cybersecurity profiles rise. SMU hired a former research director of the National Security Agency to head a new program, and UTD hosted a summit in mid-September that stems from a February executive order on cybersecurity from President Barack Obama.

Szabo said Richland has informal ties with the two schools between workshops and events. But he’d like to develop closer relationships. UTD cybersecurity director Bhavani Thuraisingham said she wants to work more with Richland, too.

Richland is working on relationships with federal security entities, Szabo said. The school is one of three Texas two-year colleges to receive special recognition from the NSA in information assurance, and Szabo said Richland will be up for review in spring 2014 to join the academic digital forensic program at the Defense Department.

As cybersecurity gains jobs and standing, many people will see Richland’s program as a means to make more money, Szabo said. But it’s not that simple.

“It is not a course, it is not a boot camp that you take over the weekend,” Szabo said. “Those people are the first ones dropping out of the courses.”

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